 It's LinkedIn learning author Monica Wahee with today's data science makeover. Watch while Monica Wahee demonstrates how to concatenate strings with the paste command in R. Hello everyone. Before we get too deep into things, I thought I better show you the paste command in a very safe setting like this one where we are not dealing with a data set just yeah. So first let me give you a very simple example of the paste command. See how we are making something here? What we are making is a concatenated string of characters. I actually thought I'd demonstrate by using this old phone number. Shout out to St. Anthony, Minnesota. Here's an example of the paste command. It takes as many arguments as you want to paste together but then at the end you have to put the sep. So you will see that I have a U.S. phone number which is three numbers, three numbers, then four numbers, and I put these without quotes in three arguments with commas in between. Then the last argument is sep equals two quotes next to each other which literally means do not separate these three arguments. I'll run this. Then I'll run the new object we made so we can look at it. See that? That's what happens when you put nothing between the quotes in the sep part of paste. It smashes the arguments together. And even though these are all numbers, here let me show you with the class command that even though these are numbers and there is no sep, I mean no separator, this is still a character string. Hey, if you want to know more about the class command, look in the description to this video. I'll link you to another video. See it says character. Okay, let's go look back at our code. Now let's try this again, but this time let's make two changes. First, let's put a dash in the sep. And second, let's not say 8888 anymore for the last four digits. Instead, let's use a letter code. 8 is represented by the letters T, U and V on a phone. So I chose to represent 8888 as TV TV. So notice that when I use letters, I have to put quotations around it since these are characters. But regardless of what we put in the paste, what we get out will be a character. The name of the object we are making is phone number with dashes. I'm going to run this code to make this new object, then run the object to show it to you. See? Now people use paste for a lot of different things. What I use it for is assembling labels that I want to put on plots. Where it is particularly powerful is when you set a variable to a particular value and then place it in a paste command to produce a very nice sentence. Imagine you had a sentence like, the temperature in the freezer is some degrees at probably some time. You could automate copying values from the freezer's thermometer to some temp variable and the current time to some time variable then use these variables in a paste command to create a sentence and then send that sentence in a text message to someone like the lab director. Yes, I had a bad experience with a quickly warming freezer in a lab. Maybe someday I'll tell you about it. But for now, that's your data science makeover for today. Thank you for watching this data science makeover with LinkedIn Learning author Monika Wahee. Remember to check out Monika's data science courses on LinkedIn Learning. Click on the link in the description.